Whether you’re an HR manager, business owner, or recruitment marketer, it’s no secret that quality hiring home health professionals is harder than ever. You’re competing for qualified candidates in a tight job market, and you need to gain a competitive advantage with an effective recruitment strategy to build your dream team.
Now, let’s take a step back: Why is hiring caregivers so challenging? Over the past few years, business shutdowns have led to high unemployment for countless industries, but the home care industry remains poised for growth. According to industry statistics, the home care industry is expected to grow 4.8 percent in 2023, with an average growth of 3.4 percent over the past five years. In other words, the constant demand for caregivers is likely to continue through 2023 and beyond.
Home care agencies are scrambling to recruit enough caregivers to support increasing demands. The good news? It’s possible to break through the digital noise and recruit skilled caregivers in a post-COVID world. Here’s how to adapt your hiring process to hire the right people for your company.
1. Create a Standardized Caregiver Hiring Process
The first step to hiring quality candidates? Create a standardized hiring process for online recruitment. Simply put, standardizing involves applying the same methods for all candidates. That means assessing candidates for the same qualifications, communicating in the same way, and advancing them to the same hiring stage. Your main goal is to create a consistent recruitment funnel so your candidates know exactly what to expect throughout the process.
After all, online recruitment is the new normal, and you need to keep up with the latest recruitment marketing trends to squeeze valuable hiring opportunities out of the current labor crisis. Not sure where to start? Think about your ideal candidates. If your goal is to get in front of on-the-go candidates, you need to meet them where they already are—and that means offering mobile-friendly applications and building an intuitive web design so they can apply wherever they are.
After the application process, you’ll want to follow up with consistent communication. To maintain a positive candidate experience, be sure to keep candidates engaged throughout the candidate screening and evaluation process. Keeping your candidates informed (whether you’re disqualifying them from the next hiring stage or moving forward) can be time-consuming, but candidate relationship management tools can help you automate communications along the way.
2. Use Technology to Accelerate the Hiring Process
When it comes to recruitment, the speed of hiring is essential. You need to move with urgency to guide your candidates through the recruiting and hiring process, but you don’t want to move too hastily or risk jeopardizing their interest in your company.
Unfortunately, even with a standardized hiring process at the forefront of your recruitment strategy, there can still be a considerable amount of administrative work required to collect, store, and manage your applicants’ information. To provide a positive candidate experience from start to finish, you need to tap into the right recruitment tools to expedite the process. That’s where an applicant tracking system (ATS) can be your MVP.
Applicant tracking systems can make all the difference in your hiring speed. They’re used to structure and customize the hiring process into an efficient framework. They’re specifically designed to attract, source, evaluate, and hire candidates so you can save time and money while finding the best people for your team.
Ultimately, ATS tools allow recruiters to view applicants, track their progress throughout different hiring stages, and filter them based on relevant qualifications. Some of the main benefits of ATS software include:
- Easily manage administrative tasks. Your ATS provides a centralized hub where you can control, store, and manage everything applicants send you—from resumes to cover letters and other important documents.
- Take bias out of the process. ATS tools evaluate all applicants using the same objective criteria, so you can rest assured you’re assessing candidates fairly throughout every step of the hiring process.
- Effectively pre-qualify candidates. By incorporating pre-qualifying questions into your job application, you can easily fast-track candidates who meet your high-priority experience (i.e., specific certifications and years of experience) qualifications. Instead of sorting through hundreds of resumes, you can focus on the best matches for your team.
3. Rethink Professional Caregiver Job Descriptions
There’s no magical solution to attracting and hiring your dream job candidates, but there are a few ways you can increase the number (and quality) of caregivers who apply to your jobs. To start, take a look at your caregiver job descriptions. These descriptions can be your first point of contact with potential candidates and, when written strategically, they can help you attract people with the right attitude, patience, and qualifications for the role.
To write the perfect job descriptions for your open roles, you’ll need to put yourself in your candidates’ shoes. When you know your audience for a particular position is savvy about your industry, you can get specific with your job descriptions right off the bat.
For example, if you’re hiring experienced senior care providers with over five years of relevant experience, you skip the cookie-cutter job descriptions. Instead, don’t be afraid to dive into hard skills and ask for specific industry experience. You can also focus on specific benefits that might appeal to your audience, such as CNA tuition reimbursement programs and transportation subsidies.
With so many changes in the home care industry over the past few years, it’s also a good idea to answer some FAQs in your job description. Here, you’ll want to keep your answers short and straight to the point while giving potential candidates the confidence they need to hit the Apply button. Depending on the position, important questions might include:
- What can candidates expect during the training process?
- What happens if my client has COVID-19?
- Does the company offer paid sick time?
4. Retain Your Current Home Care Workers
You’ve worked hard to win the war for talent and recruit your top picks, but your recruitment strategy shouldn’t end there. You need to take care of your current home care employees to grow your company and strengthen your employer brand.
Remember: Recruitment isn’t just about attracting and hiring your ideal job candidates. After the time, energy, and resources you’ve dedicated to your new hires, you need to keep them on board. It’s your job to help them feel supported throughout the onboarding process, provide comprehensive training, and keep them engaged.
Home care professionals rarely see their coworkers and can easily become disconnected from their agency, so you’ll need to go the extra mile to make them feel like a part of the team. Sure, you might need to get creative to find ways to incentivize your team and keep them satisfied, motivated, and engaged—but it’s well worth the time and effort. Some effective team-building strategies for caregivers include:
- Team check-ins before and after caregiver shifts
- Additional training and educational resources, such as seminars or hands-on training opportunities
- Maintaining a Slack channel or group chat to keep the team connected
4. Attract, Hire, and Retain Quality Home Care Candidates
In today’s post-COVID job market, you need to take a different approach from the competition to hire the best caregivers—and that starts with a powerful recruitment marketing strategy.
As more home care agencies ramp up their hiring strategy to reach the right people, you need to look at recruitment and retention differently and adapt accordingly. When you’re ready to kickstart your new strategy, download our recruitment audit checklist and schedule a discovery call to hire your dream team.
